Dreams of Orgonon: Sex, Storms & Death

Do you believe there's a natural energy that permeates the universe? Wilhelm Reich did, calling it "orgone." He also thought it was generated by orgasms, could manipulate the weather and cure cancer. Join Joe and Christian as they review Reich's life work, including a personal visit to his Orgonon observatory. We cover Reich's history, his contributions to alternative medicine and psychoanalysis, his orgone theories and his construction of orgone accumulators and cloudbusters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your mind from housetop dot com.
You find Reich to be a heavy set, ruddy brown

(00:25):
haired man of fifty wearing a long white coat and
sitting at a huge desk between periods of training students
in his theories and putting patients into orgone accumulators. He
will tell you how unutterably rotten is the underlying character
of the average individual walking the streets, and how in
the room across the hall where he works on his

(00:47):
patients he peels back their presentable surfaces to expose the
corrupted second layer of human personality. For the masses of
the people, says Reich, are endemically neurotic and sex really sick.
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. I'm Christian Saga,
and I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host Robert Lamb

(01:08):
is not with us today. He is out of the office,
so Christian and I are flying solo. But I want
to identify the source of that quote I just read.
It was a sort of a brief character sketch given
by one Mildred D. Brady, and it was written in
an article called the Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich published
in the New Republic on May nineteen. Wow, and so

(01:29):
as you can guess, we're gonna be talking about right today,
and we're gonna be talking about argone, organ accumulators, cloudbusters,
the whole shebang. Now, Christian, this is a subject that
was pretty new to me. I had no idea about
this whole strange subculture of what might you call it
psychoanalytics sexual alternative physics. Yeah, like that, that's a good application. Yeah,

(01:52):
what's what's the acronym for that? I don't know. You
guys in the audience figure that one out. It's O
R G O N E. Uh. Yeah. But so if
you are as unfamiliar as I was coming in, maybe
we can get a little bit acquainted with the subject.
From christian story of his personal experience with the the
Oregon energy. That makes it sound like I like I

(02:15):
had a little bit more of a transcendental experience than
I did. No, I mean that you went to the
estate in Maine of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, didn't you. Yeah,
this would have been ten twelve years ago. Uh, My
wife and I went on vacation to range Ly, Maine,
and we rented a cabin on the oregon On property

(02:36):
that his estate still owns. You said, Organon. Yeah, that's
the name of the facility. Um So Oregonon, I guess
is technically the entire plot of land. I think it's
a hundred and seventy five acres. This a state that
he left up in Maine. Huge. It's gorgeous. If you've
ever been up to range Le, Maine, it's very lots

(02:57):
of forest right on a lake. Um first morning we
were there, we saw a deer right outside our cabin,
like that kind of thing. So Stephen King kind of
vibe has spear eating powers from space. Maybe maybe that's
where Reich got his inspiration from. But you know, honestly,
it's just like a very sort of down to earth

(03:20):
nature experience. And um we went there because I had
read about Reich and read about his theories and read
about oregon accumulators and cloud busters and had seen I
don't know if you ever seen Kate Bush's video for
cloud Busting. But wait, what you talking about? You don't
know about that? The musician Kate Bush. Kate Bush has

(03:41):
a song called cloud Busting from the album Hounds of Love,
and uh it is. It's a great song. And the
video is shot by Terry Gilliam and stars her as
Willem Reich's son and Donald Sutherland as Willem Reich. And
it is essentially like a abs racked version of the

(04:01):
story of of Reich building a cloud Buster and then
eventually being imprisoned and dying in prison. I am extremely
tempted to stop recording right now and go watch. I
thought you knew about this, I would have mentioned it beforehand. Yeah,
that's one of the like I think, hallmark pop culture
moments for Reich. Now, if you're already lost in all
of the bizarre references to things like cloud Busters and

(04:22):
Oregon Energy, don't worry. We're gonna get We're gonna explain
it and explain what the deal is with it. But
but Christian, please continue. So, so you went to Oregon
on this big beautiful estate in Maine, and uh, it's
like a countryside of state. There's a lot of nature,
but there's very rural countryside is like it's in the
middle of nowhere. I mean Rangely itself is a small town.

(04:42):
And then I'd say organ On is like maybe five
miles outside of range Lely, and uh, but there are
buildings there too, right. Uh, yeah, well Oregon on the
the main I guess observatory slash home is a pretty
big house slash mansion thing. Now now it's a museum.
There's also a bookstore on the property. And then when

(05:04):
I was there, there were three cabins that you could
stay in. Uh huh. And so you said observatory. Now,
I think most people would assume when you say there's
an observatory out in the country somewhere, they're thinking an
astronomy observatory where you look at the stars and you
can look at the planets and the moon and stuff
like that. But that's not the kind of observatory we're
talking about, is it. No, Um, this is an Oregon.

(05:27):
It's been a while. I don't remember there being any
telescopes there, but it's it's a yeah. Ostensibly he was
studying the effects of Oregon while he lived there, and
his students. I guess I'm putting quotations around students, um,
because I don't know that they're necessarily getting any like
accredited degrees from studying under him, but they you know,

(05:50):
they worked on these devices and studying Oregon and studying
the effects of releasing orgasmic potential. I don't one of
the things I don't want to do in this episode
is go into a lot of speculation about the sexual
antics that probably happened at orgon On. Although there has

(06:10):
been plenty of speculation about Reich and his followers and
his sex life. I think it's kind of a I've
never seen the TV show Masters of Sex, but I
imagine that it's kind of like that sort of world
right where you like, he and his followers saw themselves
on the brink of like blowing up a sexual revolution. Uh,

(06:31):
and they were like maybe twenty or thirty years early,
blurring the lines between Masters of Sex and Masters of
the Universe. Well, he did claim that he shot down
UFOs with a cloudbuster. Well, and also Masters of the
Universe in the sense that he was proposing this substance
orgone as a kind of cosmic energy or or universe

(06:53):
permeating force, a kind of life force that explained all
of these strange things about So it's sort of one
of those uh answers to every question, you know what
I mean? Yeah, absolutely, I saw in one of the
pieces that we read for this, I saw somebody compare
it to George Lucas's vision of the force in Star Wars,

(07:13):
and it's a lot like that if the force was
released by having sex or masturbating. It's more like the
force in the Star Wars prequels because it's based on
tiny animals in your body. Yeah, there, there is. He
sort of had his own version of Middy Glorian's Yeah. Okay, well,
let's back up for a second here for the listeners,
because we just dropped him in the deep end. Uh,

(07:34):
let's explain who Willem Reich is very briefly, and then
what we're gonna do is we're gonna get into his
scientific theories over the years before he died. Um. What
I do want to establish upfront is that we're gonna
be very brief about the history stuff. There's a lot
that could be gone into with it in terms of
conspiracy theories or like I was mentioned earlier, the sort

(07:57):
of like rumors and of sexual antics, uh, and impropriety,
and and also about Reich in general just kind of
not being so great of a person in real life,
or at least a very unprofessional psychoanalysts. Yeah, and I've
read plenty of accounts of that. But for the purposes
of this show. I think we should stay focused for
one episode just on who he was and and the

(08:20):
and the quote unquote science of of Oregon and accumulators
in cloud busting. Okay, alright, So Reich is born in Austria,
Hungry in eight but what is now known as Ukraine. Uh.
And there's lots of stories about him having a sexually
complex childhood. I don't want to go a ton into it,

(08:41):
and there's not a lot of ways to confirm any
of this, but there's speculation by his daughter, of all people,
that he was abused by his parents sexually and his
mother committed suicide, didn't she that's correct? Yeah? Um. He
grows up uh and becomes an associate and student of
Sigmund for Fred and studies and works with Freud in

(09:02):
Vienna at the Psychoanalytic poly Clinic. Yeah. And the interesting
thing here is that Reich began his career. Whatever you
might think of Freud and psychoanalysis today, he began his
career in a circle of psychoanalysis that was at least respected.
At the time, this was considered a legitimate frontier of
science and human inquiry. Yeah, that was my impression, and

(09:25):
it was sort of honorable to be working with Freud
at the time, I think, at least within the discipline. Yeah,
so he The thing I wanted to emphasize is that
he wasn't always regarded as a kuk by everybody. Yeah.
And and also I don't know necessarily that there are
some people today that regard him as kuk. Oh. Certainly, well,
he obviously has his followers, but I mean, um, he

(09:48):
was a respected member of the psychoanalytic community, and he
held leadership positions in like professional organizations. Yeah. So he
was a guy who worked in psychoanalysis, was educated by
the who were the people who were considered the top
minds in the field at the time. My understanding is
he had a medical degree. Yeah. Yeah. Um. So I'm

(10:09):
gonna fast forward a little bit here because while he's
in Europe, there's a lot of drama, but a lot
of a lot of conflicts with political parties. He ran
into trouble with the Nazis, he ran into trouble with
the Communists, he ran into trouble with Freud. They had
a falling out, yes, and then eventually so he moved
from country to country in Europe for a while, always
kind of like getting I wouldn't say getting run out,

(10:31):
I don't necessarily the case, but the things maybe not
going his way in a certain country. And then he
moved to another one. Uh. And eventually he ended up
moving from Europe to the United States. And what year
was in nineteen thirty nine, uh, and he taught at
the New School for Social Social Research in New York City.
I don't know how long that lasted for, but he did,

(10:53):
you know, come to the United States and and work
as a teacher I think in psycho analysis. Um. But
eventually he goes up to Maine to range Lye and
he purchases the estate. The organ on estate builds his
institute his observatory there and that's where he's buried. While
he held that land, and he there's also more drama

(11:14):
regarding like his family and wives and children and stuff
like that I don't want to get into. Um. But
there was significant problems with him in the U S.
Poot and Drug administration. Yeah, he got into trouble with
the U. S. Government. And some of this would be
following that article I read at the beginning, or at
least the quote from at the beginning by Mildred Brady,
And in that article, Brady addresses some of Reich's theories

(11:40):
and his following and express his concern that Reich has
not been sufficiently condemned by the psychoanalytic community that he
used to be a part of once he started putting
out these strange theories that which we're gonna get to
in a minute, theories like or Gone and the the
orgasm theory and cloud busting, and she had concerned that

(12:00):
he was sort of selling these services and theories to
the lay public who didn't know any better, and the
scientific community or the psychoanalytic community, whether you consider that
scientific or not, was not doing a sufficient job of
letting the public know that these theories were not an
accepted part of current science. Right. So the FDA gets involved,

(12:22):
partly because of the I guess spotlight that she puts
on him. Uh and he is eventually tried in contempt
of court for violating the Food and Drug Act. And
the story goes like this that one of his assaults
associates moved an Oregon accumulator, and we'll explain to you
what that is. I want to get through the history

(12:42):
of this guy first before we dive into the weirdness.
Um moved an Oregon accumulator across state lines, and that
violated the Food and Drug Act. Like if a cargo
container full of barrels of whiskey and ahibition or or yeah,
or rice in or something, right, like, it's like the
really dangerous bad thing. So they arrest Reich and sentenced

(13:04):
him to two years in prison. He spends his time
in prison, and just before his sentences up, he dies, Yeah,
in nine seven. And so this is where a lot
of the I can see why a lot of conspiracy
theories come out, which is that the US government unjustly
arrested him, put him in prison, and when he was
trying to do things like care cancer, right. Yeah, And

(13:27):
you hear this kind of conspiracy theory tone from a
lot of Reich's supporters today, but also from Reich himself
at the time. I've listened to home recordings that Reich
made at Oregon on where he's talking into a tape
recorder and it sounds exactly like outtakes from a Limetown
episode where it's just a very creepy ambiance and uh,
and he's talking about how everyone's set against him and

(13:49):
they're all out to destroy his theories when all he
wants to do is help people and they just can't
open their minds. So one can hardly blame his followers
from having a kind of conspiracy theory mode of thinking
about the government's persecution of him. And we we might
want to be fair and say that the despite the
fact that Reich was promoting a lot of theories that

(14:10):
were clearly pseudoscience, a bunch of garbage, I think there
is a legitimate case to be made that he was
treated a little too harshly by the government. He he
kind of didn't get a fair shake. Yeah, I mean,
I mean, I'm curious about the lake inner details of
what actually was behind this f d A shake up,
But yeah, it seems to me I would agree that

(14:31):
it seems unjust to put a guy in prison for
two years for building essentially like a telephone box filled
with cotton and driving it across straight lines. He didn't
even drive it across a person who worked for him.
I mean, presumably the dangerous part of it is that
he was allegedly selling this as a cure to people
who needed help for various things like cancer or for

(14:52):
psychological trauma, and it's it's hard to know to what
extent he was really benefiting off of other people's misinformation
about how likely this was to help them. One thing
we've had trouble tracking down is where where his money
came from. He clearly came from a fairly upper class,
well to do family in Europe, but also, um, it's

(15:14):
not quite clear how much, you know, how how he
was getting paid for his services for his research, if
he was getting donations, if he wasn't. He himself said
right that he didn't take any payment. Yeah, he's like,
I treat people for cancer with Oregon accumulators, and I
don't accept any payment for it. I And yet he
had a seventy acre estate in Rangely, Maine, right on

(15:35):
a lake. And of course, I mean, I guess at
the time it was probably worth less than it is now,
but it's still pretty extravagant. Well, anyway, even after he died,
his legacy continues. He wasn't just forgotten about. He still
has followers today. You can go on YouTube and look
at people who were talking about Oregon Energy and about
how it's going to fix their problems. So there's a

(15:56):
little bookstore on the estate, and I presumably all of
this is run by the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, which
if you go online there there's a whole site devoted
to this UH and you can buy his books and
videos and all that stuff there. But this is sort
of like the physical manifestation of it. UH. And as
far as I could tell, it was it was basically
run by by, you know, people from the town of

(16:17):
Rangeley who were just taking a paycheck to like give
tours of the museum UH and then like run the bookstore.
I didn't get the sense that they were like old
followers of his that have like stayed on the estate
for years or anything like that. Like that was not
the the the vibe at all. It very much just
felt like this was like a job for them. Um.

(16:39):
You could tell because they had way too much organ
and accumulated. Yeah, I mean their armor was all over
the place. But um so. But there's a lot of
books by him, and they're kept in print by two publishers.
One is the American College of Organomy UH and the
other one is a journal called the Journal of Organomy.
And these are you know, purportedly scientific UH publications. Imagine

(17:03):
that their their publications are not widely accepted in the
medical literature. I don't think so. Um I did when
I was there, though, I did buy one of his books,
and I bought This tells you how long ago it was.
I bought a VHS tape of of what you Watched Yesterday,
which is a YouTube video documentary in the losest terms, Well, yeah,
about his history. Yeah, I watched one of these documentaries

(17:26):
that I think it was produced by the Infant Trust.
It was clearly a pro Wilhelm Reich documentary, and it
framed all of all of the criticisms of his work
as distortions and fabrications, and it was very defensive in tone.
And uh, it was kind of a it was kind
of a hagiography, like a portrait of a great man

(17:48):
who was unfairly treated. Well, I can say, you know,
I was there in my mid twenties, and I was
certainly will I don't I didn't necessarily believe in orgone.
I was pretty fascinated with his history and just these
ideas in general. Uh, and and so you know I
was willing. Yeah, I bought this video and I took

(18:08):
it back to Boston and showed it to my A
bunch of my friends and was like, can you believe
this happened? Can you believe this happened to this guy?
And and to be fair, like, I'm still you know, uh,
pretty upset. It's it's unfair that this guy went to
jail and died in jail, you know. But well maybe
maybe we can have a discussion about that. But but
you know, the stuff about the cloud busting and everything else,

(18:30):
it's like a little uh. And my friends right rightfully
were like, uh, this is weird. Um. But so I
still hold onto that VHS today, although now it's on
YouTube and anybody can go watch it, right, you just
go and type in Wilhelm ric organ and it shows up. Um.
But so the publications that are still out there now

(18:53):
in this journal, they were started by a psychiatrist called
Ellsworth Baker, and uh, like Joe said earlier, there are
some Rikian believers and practitioners that are still out there today. Uh,
And they occasionally get publicity occasionally see some of this
stuff pop up in the news, like you know, usually
under the headline of like you know, sex, energy, sure

(19:15):
something or whatever. Right, you know, it's it's pretty click
baby stuff. I'm surprised. I'm surprised that it hasn't made
their rounds again in the last couple of years. You know,
maybe like on I don't know, like BuzzFeed or something
like that. They would probably love a good Wilhelm rank story.
It has the S word. Yeah, right, exactly. Um. And
in the nineties, Rankings were even conducting research into how

(19:38):
a pregnant mother's emotions can affect her newborns delivery and
subsequent development. So like, things that happened to your mother
while you are in the womb can influence you. Yeah,
And ideas like that taken in isolation, like like if
you don't know that somebody's coming at this with an
or goon slant to it, Uh, that could seem like

(19:58):
a perhaps legitimate to research. I mean absolutely consider it
could be possible and you could test this in a
controlled setting to see, Okay, what if we just alter
variables causing sad or happy experiences for pregnant women, how
do their children turn out? Now, the ethics of that
might be questionable, but yeah, I mean that seems like

(20:19):
a thing that would be possible to study. Maybe. So
in preparing for this episode, obviously we didn't have the
time to go and read the entire history of the
Journal of Orgonomy, but I did pull one article by
a guy I don't know. His first name is h
and his last name was Chavis Uh and this was
published in the nineties. So this this was sort of

(20:40):
like my experience with reading a riichy and practitioner in
the nineties. There they're sort of outlook and he claimed
in the article that he couldn't list the data or
observations that have been made about orgone because there wasn't
enough space paper wise in the journal for him to
account for all of them, so he just didn't list

(21:02):
any of them. He didn't list any There were nones.
This is why many papers that we especially that we
read for for the show have literature reviews. So you
go in, you read the literature that's in the field,
and then you write, you know, a summary of what
the literature has has come up with so far about
this particular topic, and you link back to or cite

(21:23):
those sources. Right. Um, that way people can go, Okay,
if I want to know more about this and track
it down, they can go find those other sources and
and maybe replicate them. Right. So that was not in
this piece. I'd also say the language within it is
weirdly cultish. Yeah. One of the things I observed in
that Wilhelm Right documentary I watched was that the language,

(21:47):
the the sort of style and presentation and tone of
it was very similar to materials I've seen produced by
the Church of Scientology concerning the life of L. Ron
Hubbard that have a bunch of you know, videos about L.
Ron Hubbard just talking about what a great man he
was and his his wonderful ideas that were misunderstood, and

(22:08):
it was extremely familiar based on having watched those things before. Yeah,
this is a theme that I think we're going to
keep coming back to throughout this episode. But I see
a lot of parallels between reich And and L. R. H.
As they like to call him in the Church UM.
One specific example was Chavis used UM language like moving

(22:29):
towards the world and moving away from the world to
define scientific principles like mitosis or orgone in in the
argument that was presented in the paper, or even like
just the way that the human organism develops UM, and
they were used as if these were like, you know,

(22:49):
legit scientific community phrases that were accepted as we all
understood what they meant, and it was very unclear what
what it actually meant. I think this is something that's
always good to look out for if you're on the
if you're on the lookout for pseudoscience, look for vague terminology,
especially when it concerns the the actual like the crucial

(23:11):
actions that are being described as as causing an effect.
In some case, when people use words like activity or
something like that, you know there's something that's very vague
where you're not saying what's actually happening, you're just saying
something goes on. Right, Well, alright, real quick, there's two
less little bits I want to get into about his
history and then let's dive into his ideas. So his

(23:34):
daughter aver Reich actually toured the world demonstrating her father's
ideas after his death, so she was a believer. Although
I think it like sort of evolved into something more
along the lines of what we think of as bio
energetics today, and his student Alexander Lohen went on to
co found the Institute of bio Energetics UM. Usually people

(23:55):
who work within that field are psychologists, they don't have
a medical degree. UM. But it was way more popular
than organomy was like bio energetics has still has like
quite a following, I believe. Uh, when we talk about
raiki and practitioners and believers, I think it's a fairly
small subset compared to you know, some other alternative medicine types. Well,

(24:18):
let's dive into the organ zone. I think it's time
to talk about the epics of his theories and see
what's what's all the big fuss about. Okay, So let's
start with talking about his psychological theories, mainly about armoring
and what is sort of known as alternative medicine today. Okay. Um, So,
after he studied with Sigmund freud, Reich theorized this is

(24:38):
sort of his general theory for this is that the
physical inability to surrender yourself to an orgasm is what
causes neurosis in a person. Okay, So this sounds pretty
similar to stuff that would already be propagated by people
like Freud, right that they hypothesized the origins of most

(24:59):
or all psychological difficulty in some kind of sexual trauma
or sexual frustration. Right, Yeah, although I think it should
be noted here and again this gets into the lake,
uh like really dramatic history of Reich's life. But Freud
didn't necessarily agree with a lot of his ideas and
took a good step back and distanced himself from Reich.

(25:21):
And that was kind of a shadow that loomed over
Reich for the rest of his career. Um. But so
Reike saying sexual frustration neurosis, yeah, and then not sexual
frustration specifically, you can't get to orgasm, you have neurosis, yeah, exactly. Uh.
And and he extrapolated this outward, saying that this is
actually what causes people to turn to fascism and authoritarianism.

(25:45):
And he saw his mission as being to eradicate fascism.
Now keep in mind, you know, he was coming up
with these theories in Europe during the rise of Nazism,
and so I think he saw this is like kind
of his only way to sort of combat what he
saw as being injustice, right. Uh. And he referred to

(26:06):
events like fascism as collective neurotic disorders. So he saw
this as a process that began in the delivery room.
This gets back to that research we were talking about
those in the nineties where medical staff let their unfeeling
procedures in nature induced anxiety and anguish into newborn babies,

(26:27):
you know, the kind of cold, mechanical feeling of a
hospital room. He saw that as being like our introduction
to the world and immediately installing anxiety into us. Okay,
And I think this is another thing where a lot
of people might look at that idea today and say, well,
there's maybe something to that. Have we medicalized birth too much? Right? Yeah?
Where you have today like sort of alternative birth settings, right,

(26:51):
you know? Yeah, this is certainly something that has become
popularized since his death. Um. So here here's an example
sort of his trajectory for the orgasm neurosis combo. So
let's say you're a child and you're abused, uh, and
you would store the trauma from your abuse as muscular tension. Uh.

(27:14):
And this with later in life as when you're an adult,
become chronic physical pain. And so he thought that um,
because of the emotional trauma being stored as physical pain,
this informed a person's character and their physical being, like
how they carried themselves, how they looked even um. And
he identified things like asthma, allergies, colitis, heart disease, high

(27:39):
or low blood pressure, and cancer as all resulting from
orgone blockages. Inside the body. So this is when orgon
first starts creeping up into his his literature. I don't
think he's necessarily solidified the idea of it as being
like this energy that binds the universe together yet, but
but it's it's sort of part of the theory, right uh.

(28:01):
And he sees that the only way to sort of
get rid of this and what he calls the life
formula is an essential constriction and release within the body
that's in multiple organic processes. Right. So this again came
from the article that was written by his follower in
the nineties, things like mitosis and bladder function. Right, there's

(28:24):
essential constriction and then released to that build up of
tension and then a catharsis yea. And so he saw
that as being an example of that this is this
permeates the universe. This is how it functions, and if
you don't cathartically release the orgasm, you'll just keep building
up this bad stuff exactly. Yeah, Okay, So in Night

(28:45):
he publishes this is. This is much later, after he's
in the US, he publishes a book called The Function
of the Orgasm, And this is where he argues that
under all of our layers of repressed muscle. We have
something that he called orgiastic potency. Uh. And basically our
muscles and our deep tissues retain all these powerful memories

(29:07):
of our previous emotional states. Uh. And the muscular repression
is preventing us from achieving full orgasmic release and thus
actually experiencing a full life. So is this explaining for
him how a person could in fact be experiencing orgasms
but still not quite begetting the release. It's this sort
of sounds like a way of reconciling the fact that

(29:30):
Um saying the problem is people aren't having orgasms, but
some people are and they still have neuroses. Yeah, and
I think this is later in the notes, but he
actually like noted in his journals at one point that
he had patients who UM would masturbate and they would
like be free of their neuroses for one week, like
he measured it, and then their neuroses would creep back

(29:53):
up unless they masturbate it again. So yeah, it kept
coming back around to the orgasm as being sort of
like this key component to to freeing yourself. So he
calls these blockages in our muscles armoring. And you might
have heard that term before. It's used in lots of
other settings. I think we kind of use it just

(30:14):
in general every day talk. Now, when you say, like
someone is armored, right, if if I said, uh, Donald
Trump is armored, then you would so you would sort
of have an idea of what I meant, that he
sort of guarded and reserved physically about his emotions. Would
you say that about Donald? I don't think he's armored
at all. It was just picked a random Let me

(30:34):
tell you Donald Trumps. His organ energy is off the charts.
He is completely free and released. Uh So underneath Reich thought,
under all this armor is where our true corese self is, right,
the decent, loving emotional being that we all essentially are.
This sort of connects to that quote I read very
at the very beginning where Brady talked about how Reich

(30:56):
would peel away the layers of people that the ship
and neurotic layers to reveal the person underneath. Yeah, And
I do want to note like I think that Reich
meant well right, Like I think that he had altruistic
intentions with his work. Um, given all the weird accounts
that I've read that you know about his I guess

(31:18):
like taking advantage of patients or or other things like yeah,
like along those lines, like I think he got misdirected
from his original goals. Well, I think this happens with
a lot of people like this, where people there there's
a cognitive dissonance because you look at them and you say, Okay,
sometimes it seems like they meant well, but then other

(31:39):
times they took advantage of people. I mean, I think
that makes sense. People are like that. People are a
mixed bag. Sometimes they're trying to do good and sometimes
they're being opportunistic and selfish. That can happen within the
same person. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. So, his general therapy that
he designs to deal with this theory, he calls it
character analysis, and the idea that he would help patients

(32:02):
overcome their physical and respiratory blockages, uh, the things that
are preventing them from experiencing pleasure in life. Right. So
he encourages therapists when he's teaching them about this to
observe their patients bodies and facial language as indicators of
their personality. Um, things like the way that we sit,
the way that we speak, the way that we walk.

(32:24):
They all would provide clues to these therapists about what
the inner self was, what actually was. Uh. So, then
he moves from a therapeutic sort of you know, traditional
talking on the couch with a shrink setting too deep
tissue massage. There's a way to get rid of this

(32:44):
hold on that sounds like it could be euphemistic. What
is it actually? So I believe it's actual deep tissue massage. Again.
You know, there's been some insinuations that there was some
hanky panky going on, but I believe that they genuinely
were giving massages to release mush muscle tension. It was
very painful, and the idea was that it would work

(33:06):
the trauma out. And when this was done in conjunction
with working with the client on their breathing, it would
help them express emotions that they couldn't normally express, like
anger or rage, and the release of such musculature would
create such an intense emotional release that they would finally
feel bliss. They would be happy for you know, one

(33:28):
of the first times in their life. Uh and Reich
called this or go not extreaming. When you reached that state,
when you released that anger, uh and that what you
would see as results in this during the massages would
be sadness, longing and unrestrained sobbing. Now this is again,
this is another thing that went on to become you

(33:50):
know quite uh. I guess a discipline within both massage
and ideas like well like uh, primal scream therapy for example,
but like other kind of like alternative therapies in which
people would release their their anger. Are there any particular
words you're supposed to scream? I have no idea, although
I will say that I just I'm sad that I

(34:12):
didn't get to write this, but how stuff works now.
Just published an article this week about rage rooms. Have
you heard about these? I saw the link. Yeah, so, um,
I'm fascinated and there's one here in Atlanta, and I
kind of want to go, Like maybe we should do
like an episode where we go there and record what happens.
But basically they set up these rooms uh that for
you to destroy in in anger. So they give you

(34:35):
like a baseball bat or whatever, and you just go
around this room and smash everything up. Uh, And it's
supposed to help you cathartically release you know, you're bad
week or whatever. Um Uh it sounds real fascinating to
me I'm curious about it, but I think in age
room would appeal to Reich. You know, intuitively, i'd say
that that makes sense. You, Oh yeah, you have catharsis,

(34:55):
you get all of your rage out you. It's sort
of like a pressure release valve in the Reich and
kind of sends you release the tension. But I think
there's also a sense in which you can compound frustrations
by expressing them. Oh yeah, yeah, I've definitely done that. Like,
I think that there's a common thing I observed and
sometimes in myself, but also in friends and people I
care about, where you make yourself mad or about a

(35:17):
topic by venting about it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. Again. So, like,
this is a thing that I think that we've talked
about this before the show, but I would really love
for the scientific community to actually dive into this stuff
and just produce a lot of quantitative evidence about what,

(35:38):
you know, how it works, um, the clinical psychology of
of Richyanism, or just like yeah, like the different expressions
of cathartic anger and or sadness leading to happiness. I'm
sure there's already somebody of research on that. Yeah, And
so that's fair like um, I had a hard time
finding present day research that was connected to this because

(36:00):
because I was using the search terms Reich or or
Gone in my searches. But there does seem to be
literature out there that's just part of the general field
of psychology about this. Okay, So getting back to Reich
and his idea of psychology and therapy, he argued that
this had to be guided by what he referred to

(36:21):
as a competent therapist, so probably somebody who trained under him,
because the results could actually overwhelm a patient. This gets
to what you're saying that, like, you know, if you're
venting in the wrong setting, that it can be bad, right,
and he said that this could lead to suicide. This
almost sounds like, you know, you must confess to a
priest ordained by the church itself. Yes, yeah, and there's

(36:43):
you cannot have a la confessor. I think that I
think there's a good argument to be made that there's
a bit of theology and and you know, uh cultishness
about his theories. And this is where it really starts
kind of forming, right where it's like, you can only
do it under my guidance, and only I have the
secret to the universe. Um, so that his secret part

(37:06):
of it was that the body was divided up into
seven different segments and this is where the armor formed.
And the segments included the eye, the oral I'm assuming
that means the mouth, the neck, the chest, the diaphragm,
the belly, and the pelvic segments. Uh okay. So it's
arguable that Reich's theories lead to many other theories and

(37:29):
movements within the field of psychology or alternative medicine that
we've talked about, right, Primal screen therapy, we talked about that,
gastalt therapy, bio energetics, Reichy, dozens of others, right, So
there's lots of places that this went after he passed away.
Averich's daughter, remember we were talking about her. She had
a particular kind of bio energetic body work that was

(37:52):
very different from her father's. Didn't involve the hard pressing.
I mean body work like physical manipulation of the body
as psychological treatment. Yes, yeah, hers was more like light
they're called butterfly touching and creak emotions and blocked energy.
I'm imagining that it's a little bit like a s
MR and that like there's whispering and light, you know

(38:15):
how like an a s m R, Like there's sometimes
like that touch of feather to a microphone or something
like that. I imagine it's kind of along those lines.
Oh well, I mean, if there's anything to that, I
just recommend coming up with a different name for it. Yeah, well,
butterfly touching. I'm going in for a butterfly touching session. Yeah.
And if you don't know what we're talking about with
a s MR, how stuff Works has covered it in

(38:37):
lots of different ways. But I believe that there's a
stuff to blow your mind video about a SMR. There's
definitely a brain stuff video about as MR because I
wrote it. Jonathan Strickland did a text Stuff podcast about it. Yeah,
So if you want to learn more about that that,
we have lots of information about that. But I think
I think a SMR is slightly connected to some of
Reich's ideas um and Lowen's idea. His bio energetic ideas

(38:59):
was more or along lines of exercises that would loosen
armor and release energy. And you know that gets to
like I take a lot of yoga classes, and I
know Robert does as well. I'd like to hear what
Robert's opinions are on these things. But there is essentially
like some part of yoga that's that has these same ideas, right,

(39:20):
that if you do these particular exercises and you stretch
your body in particular ways, that it's going to align
your mind and body together. Yeah. I'm not a yoga
practitioner myself. That's another one of those things that just
at a at an intuitive level, it seems to make sense.
I don't know if I've ever seen any research that

(39:41):
makes me think that there's a scientific basis for believing that,
but it certainly seems plausible it could be true. Given
my experience with it. It certainly feels like it works. Um.
But then you have people like Rex follower Chavis, who's
in his paper says that you can see the orgon
contraction exp ancient concept of armor in all organisms, and

(40:03):
he says this includes everything from amba and protozoans to
human beings. Okay, well, I think now it's time to
take a break. But when we come back, we're going
to get into the orgone energy itself and we're back.

(40:24):
So all right, we've talked about his psychological ideas. Let's
get into orgone. What this is? This is the big
the big tuna in the basket, as I might say,
orgone energy. It seems to be. This is where Reich
stepped out of psychoanalysis and tried to bridge some gap

(40:44):
between his psychoanalytic theories and physics. Yeah. Yeah, and to
my understanding, not having any kind of degrees or legitimacy
in physics, well, I mean, I wouldn't be an utter credentialist.
I wouldn't say you need to have a degree in
sis to do good work in physics, but you do
need to get the kind of results and to formulate

(41:05):
your theories in a way that other people can test
to see if there's anything to them. Right. So he
takes this idea from his earlier psychological theories and extrapolates
it that the orgasm expresses a primal mass, free energy
slash force of life that he calls orgone. And as

(41:26):
I mentioned before, it's it's weirdly like the force from
Star Wars. I wonder if George Lucas read any Reichian
literature before he wrote Star Wars? Hold on, does it
surround us? Does it bind us the natural world? It
does bind us? I don't think that a Reich believed
that you could, like, you know, levitate starships with your
mind with orgone. But maybe he would have gotten to

(41:48):
that point, you know, if he if he'd studied a
little further. He did think that it was expressed in
a number of phenomenon, including the Aurora borealis. He thought
the Aurora borealis was caused by oregon and accumulated in
the atmosphere. So he's not just positing a life force
of some kind as many people have done that's present

(42:08):
in the bodies of animals and living organisms. I mean,
when you think of mesmerism and and old concepts of
animal electricity from before we discovered that, you know, the
electricity animals is just like the electricity. It's very in
the outside world. There. There have been a lot of
concepts throughout history of there there's still kind of force

(42:28):
in living things. But but he's taking this and saying no, no, no,
it's a force in the universe and you can see
it outside of bodies. Yeah, I mean, to your point,
it's very similar to the Chinese concept of q, the
Japanese idea of key Hindu prana, and even some cobbalistic ideas. Right,
So this this binding energy slast force thing isn't something

(42:51):
that's particularly new, but yes, you're right. He believed that
you could actually observe it physically under a microscope. He
called this bions their particles that he claimed he saw
blue particles. So this is we mentioned at the top.
These are sort of the minty chlorines of oregone, little

(43:11):
little things he saw what in the blood vessels of
the body or something. I'm not sure what he was
looking at under the microscope actually um and and who knows,
you know, he but he thought because of this blue quality,
that oregon was responsible for lots of blue things. So,
for instance, he thought the reason why the sky was
blue was because of oregon um. And he extrapolates out

(43:35):
from this general theory of this life force into the
technologies that we're going to talk about now, which are
his organ accumulators and cloud busters, that you could manipulate
oregon in such a way to receive beneficial effects from it. Yeah, okay,
So let's say that you are a patient of Wilhelm
Reich and he decides that, well, you've got you've got

(43:58):
an orgon problem. What are we gonna do about it. So, uh,
he says, you should sit inside my organ accumulator and
what this is? Tell what does it look like. Well,
I've actually seen one because they're at the organ On Museum. Um,
but we also have a picture here in front of us.
They're basically like these phone booth sized devices with like

(44:20):
a door that he designed and the idea was that
they would harness orgone and he believed that you could
use it to cure everything from neurosis to cancer. This
is this is where the cure for cancer idea came in.
This is where your flag should go up whenever you
hear somebody saying, hey, look I can cure cancer. Yeah,
it's right. There wasn't a ton of evidence that he
was doing any such thing. Um. The actual accumulators, I

(44:44):
guess they're kind of like Faraday cages like there, so
it's alternating layers of wood and steel on the outside
and then on the inside they're lined with these layers
of organic materials like wood and cotton in paper. Like
I remember seeing like you could actually see the layers
when you got in the thing. Like, um, there was
like stuffed paper and cotton inside, and um, he the

(45:07):
idea here was they were alternating organic and inorganic compounds,
and he thought that orgon energy would oscillate around inside
this box because of the way that oregon interacted with
different inorganic and organic materials. Yeah, wasn't the idea that
the organic materials would suck the orgon in and then
the metal materials would reflect it back inwards so that

(45:30):
it would get trapped. It would be kind of like
a greenhouse effect in the box for orgone. Yeah, and
and um, so this is you know, you're probably listening
and going, well, that just sounds plain crazy, right. He
goes to Albert Einstein and he's like, Hey, I've got
this idea for this orgon accumulator thing. I think it's

(45:50):
pretty you know, on the mark. Let's test this out.
And Einstein is excited about it at first. He's like,
oh wow, that like this is really interesting. But I
in Stein's assistant, Leopold Infeld, believed that the organic accumulators
were producing heat basically because of the different temperature gradients

(46:10):
in the room that they were in. Right, So he
points us out to Einstein and Einstein's like, oh, yeah,
you're a total fraud. Uh go away. Reich and Uh,
he rejects this theory completely. Yeah, I wanted to read
a section I mentioned earlier that documentary, that sort of
pro Wilhelm Reich documentary. Uh, and I want to present
this is sort of the mode of thinking about how

(46:33):
they dealt with the results of their cancer treatment via
orgon accumulators. So here here's the quote. Because his results
with cancer mice were so promising, Reich decided to test
the effects of orgone radiation on human subjects. He constructed
orgone energy accumulators that were large enough for a person
to sit in, and in nineteen forty two he began

(46:54):
experimental treatments with cancer patients. They were all terminal cases.
Reich prom us no cure and charge no money. Over
a period of time, the patients showed marked improvement, relief
of pain, healthier blood condition, weight gain, and the shrinkage
and elimination of tumors. Despite these positive results, the patients died,

(47:15):
reinforcing rex convention that cancer is a bio energetic shrinking
following emotional resignation, and that the tumors themselves are not
the disease, but merely a local manifestation of a deeper
systemic disorder. I think it's funny there the way they
kind of just brush aside the fact that they all died. Well. Yeah,

(47:36):
and we were talking about this a little bit before
we came into recording. I guess, like, for me, if
those people were getting a certain kind of like psychological
well being and contentment from this, whether it worked or not,
like if it was just a placebo, you know, I
wouldn't begrudge them that. Well, but I mean the question
is are they being um, are they being misled about

(47:59):
their chance of being helped by this? And are they
being uh or is this being substituted for a treatment
that would have a higher success rate? Yeah? Well, do
you know who owned an organ accumulator actually built one himself?
I don't know. Tell me you think that. I'm about
to say Ben Boland, but I no, no, no, You're
gonna say, You're gonna say Kenny Rogers, No close, Elvis

(48:22):
Williams Burrows. Williams Burrows had one, and he used to
write in it. Uh. And my understanding is that Burrows,
uh I thought that the like he he wanted the
effects of the organ accumulator to help him with his
heroin addiction, and that like the the energies that were
created in there helped him to be more creative, you know,
when he was writing. But of course his Reich's theory

(48:45):
about Oregon wasn't just static. He continued to sort of
update it with new discoveries. You might hear discoveries and
air quotes there. Yeah, so, um, then he updates it
later on and too, he says, there's another form. It's
sort of like the force. Again, there's the light side
and the dark side. So there's a sith organ there's
a sith orgon, and it's deadly orgon radiation. He identifies

(49:06):
this as uh. He uses the acronym d O R
for it. And he saw this as being kind of
like the anti matter version of oregon, and it's responsible
for all environmental degradation uh, and that this kind of
orgone could actually be contaminated by radiation. And this is

(49:26):
another instance where it feels like he's influenced by what's
going on at the time with nuclear testing and the
use of the atom bomb during World War Two, and
he's he's either incorporating that into his theories somehow or
he's reacting to it because of Again, let's get back
to his general idea is to stop fascism, right right, Well,
I mean this sounds a lot like one of the
plots of those atomic age horror sci fi movies. There's

(49:49):
there's an atomic test that contaminates some kind of force
or energy and creates a monster. Yeah, like giant ants
or something like that. Yeah. Well, he said that the
results of d O R we're actually desertification. So he
ups and moves his whole family from range Le, Maine
to Tucson, Arizona in ur and the idea is that

(50:11):
he's going to combat the desert with a new invention
that he has that's gonna harness or gone to fight
d O R off um And he wrote, it hadn't
rained in Tucson in five years. That's not true, Like
if you go back and you look at at at
National Weather Service records of the time it had rained

(50:32):
in Tucson. But but so part of his writings are,
you know, Tucson's the ideal place to do this. It
hasn't rained in five years. I'm going to fix this desert.
I love what you said that he was going to
square off against the desert. I'm just imagining him standing
on a sand dune looking out across the desert saying
I will defeat you. This is kind of um. You
know we were talking about the Kate Bush video earlier.

(50:55):
That's kind of it. It's like him and his son
with a cloud buster against the desert. Well, this leads
to the last thing we're going to talk about, which
is Reich's biggest final technological innovation, which is the cloud buster.
Right now, people have long wanted to control the weather.
That's obvious. You know. People did religious rituals to control
the weather. People have experimented with cloud seating and hal cannons.

(51:19):
Cloud seating maybe sort of works, it's it's not clear
exactly how well it works. Has had episode about it
for Forward Thinking. Forward Thinking just recently did a did
some weather modification episodes. Hail cannons are these things that
send shock waves of the clouds to make it not hail. Um.
I don't think that there's any scientific evidence that these
things work. I think these were theories that we're floating

(51:40):
around it during Wright's time as well, Like the cloud
seating was definitely like being thought about. Oh yeah, um,
and so this was kind of his answer to that, right, um.
And the idea is that he would harness orgone energy
and redirect it to manipulate the weather. So remember he
thought the atmosphere, this guy being the Aurora borealis, all

(52:01):
these things were affected by Oregon. But the idea here
was that he would mainly use it to grow crops.
So the cloud buster would dispel d O R. So
when you watch that that documentary, did they show cloudbusters
in it? Yeah, okay they did, so, Like I uh,
they have Cloudbusters at organ On So when I went
there and visited, you know, got to see it up

(52:21):
close and personal, and it's and they presented it as
if it unquestionably works. Well, there's some dispute about that,
although there are there were other people that weren't Reik
that said that it was working for them. Well, I mean,
this is a thing that comes up whenever you're talking
about whether modification attempts is like, what if you do
something and then you do something to try to make

(52:43):
it rain, and sometime over the next day or two
it does rain. Yeah, wait, did it work? I mean
you could say, oh, it worked, but maybe it was
just gonna rain anyway. But as Kate Bush says, every
time it rains, the sun's coming out. I still I'm
still like, my mind's blown. I've got to go listen
to the thing. We'll listen to it afterwards. Um So,

(53:03):
the cloudbusters basically look like this. They're like these series
of hollow metal pipes. They kind of look like a
giant pan flute you're right on, and they're bound. Those
pipes are bound together, and then there's cables that run
out of them and right would either run them right
into the ground or into water into the lake there
at oregonon I don't know where where he was putting

(53:25):
them in Tucson, the cables themselves, but um uh. The
idea was that he would aim the series of pipes
upward at the sky and it would the water would
attract or gone and draw it up through the cable
and then out through the pipes, and the pipes would
shoot or gone into the sky and it would create
clouds in their way. This would subsequently lead to rain.

(53:49):
So he does these experiments in Tucson. Tucson does experience
heavy rain during his experiments. So just as you said,
you know, there's kind of this well, look it worked,
you know, And of course for him he's like, yeah,
I've got some tiger repellent to sell you. Then it
gets this is where Reich's stuff. It really goes off
the rails for me personally. Uh in May of nineteen

(54:12):
hold on, it didn't before. I you know, there was
always a small part of me that was like, especially
like when I visited organ and that was kind of like,
what if there's something to this cloud busting could be
kind of cool if like I go up to the
cloud Buster and I can feel the ripples of Oregon
like like around it, Like, oh it it works. Did
you feel them? No? Did you feel the sacred vibrations?
There was nothing. There was nothing. There was a nice

(54:35):
wood at a state We took a nice walk in
the woods. That sounds great. Um May of nineteen fifty three,
Right claims that he used a cloud Buster to drive
off to UFOs. So now we're entering X Files territory.
In fact, I was shocked that there wasn't an X
Files episode about Reich. Right. He thought that UFOs were

(54:58):
actually influenced by Oregon energy and that the idea was
that Cloudbusters could be used like a space gun to
fend them off. I have nothing to add to that.
I mean, it's kind of crazy. There isn't a lot
about it, um, And there also isn't a lot about
like what he actually meant by UFOs, you know, so

(55:20):
like who knows if he thought they were alien spaceships
or he thought it was something else, But he clearly
thought like the phenomena was connected to Oregon and that
Cloudbusters would make it stop. Um this now, I hope
I have my timeline straight. But this early nineteen fifties era,
this was sort of UFO fever. Right after World War
Two was when people started really seeing UFOs. Yeah, I

(55:42):
think so. I mean, we have consult Ben, Matt and
Knoll on this, because there really are in house experts.
But yeah, I want to say, like, when when did
the Roswell incident purportedly happen? I just looked it up.
It was okay. So that's a good amount of time
for that to kind of enter popular consciousness and and
him to be aware of it, especially because he's in
Arizona and it's it's probably something that's being talked about. Well.

(56:06):
He goes back to Maine in nineteen fifty four with
the Cloudbuster farmers in Maine. We're having trouble growing their
blueberry crops, so they paid right. So okay, now we
know he made some money at least off of this.
They paid right to produce rain to help their crops,
and these farmers said it was successful. There was an

(56:27):
article in the Bangor Daily News from the time in
which they interviewed some of these farmers and they said,
I don't know how he's doing it, but it works
like it's raining. My crops are better. So there you go. Um,
but their accounts differ slightly from the official National Weather
Service records for Bangor around that time. So like the
days that they said it rain, we're different from when

(56:49):
it you know, the actual governmental records of when it rained.
Now again, I can see where conspiracy theorists would dive
right into that and say, well, you know, of course
the governmental records were all there it or something like that.
But um, so the cloudbuster is really kind of the
apex of Reich's orgone technology movement, right, Um, because of

(57:12):
what we mentioned earlier with the whole f D a
thing somebody moved in or going to accumulator across state lines,
he goes to prison and dies in prison. Yeah, so anyway,
for me, the whole story about Wilhelm Reich raises several
interesting questions. One of them is when it's legitimate for
the state authorities, or for really any authorities, maybe even

(57:34):
just professional authorities like a psychiatric or professional organizations, to
step in and interfere with what somebody is claiming as
scientific research or medical therapy. I mean, there are extreme
cases where you can say, Okay, what if somebody's selling
flu shots out the back of their van and they're

(57:54):
full of drain. Oh, that seems pretty obvious this person
is committing a crime, and uh, and the governed it
should step in and stop them and take them to jail. Um.
What if somebody is just selling people a cancer treatment
that there's no evidence makes them better? Yeah? Is that
a case where the government should step in and say

(58:15):
you can't do that? Or I don't know, I feel
like that's a tough case. Yeah. I mean for me
personally in the Reich example, unless there's like evidence or
I'm missing something completely from the story. Maybe there's listeners
out there who are steeped much deeper in Rech history
and lore than I am. But it does seem fairly

(58:35):
unjust to me to um put this guy in prison.
For two years and also sort of a waste of
taxpayer dollars to you know, run a trial and everything
and keep him in prison. Yeah, solely because he said
that he could care cancer with this telephone box. In
what way is the person being honest with people? So

(58:56):
it seems to me that it would make a difference
if somebody says, hey, I've got this experimental treatment. It's
not proven. You know, you you really should be informed
about what your options are, but you can try this
if you're interested, versus somebody saying I'm a doctor and
let me tell you all the other stuff they're gonna
do for you at the hospital. It's bunk. You need

(59:17):
to get into my box. Well, and that's the thing
that's going to save your life, and give me all
your money. I mean, those do seem like kind of different. Yeah,
although to me, I do want to make clear, like
I don't know necessarily that that's how Reich was portraying it,
you know, I know, I mean I'm asking like it's
hard to know what level of of what since he
was leveling with people and what since he was overstating

(59:40):
what kind of results they could expect or overstating the
proven effectiveness of his methods. So well, there's two things here,
like like his license as a medical doctor should have
been called into question if that were the case. And
I'm not sure if he was licensed as a medical
doctor in the United States. He may have earned a
degree in Europe, but I don't know that he necessarily,

(01:00:01):
you know, filed the right paperwork or took the right
accreditation to keep that in the United States. Now, obviously
we do make a distinction between medical procedures and other
kinds of pseudoscience, because you can the hail cannons I
talked about earlier there. I don't think that people who
are experts in the field of weather think that there's
anything to these. There's no evidence that they work, but

(01:00:22):
you can sell them. Sure, you're fine. Nobody's gonna take
you to jail for selling a hail cannon, right, as
long as it's not hurting anybody, right or the environment,
I guess. But so then there's the other The other
side of this too is like you know, we mentioned
earlier that there were patients who had cancer who went
underwent orgone accumulator therapy and died, right, Well, it said

(01:00:46):
that all of them died. They claimed though they claimed
that the thing that that stuck in their minds was
that they had pain relief, or they said they had
pain relief. I mean, then again, those those are things
that can be a acted by psychosomatic maybe a placebo effect.
So I guess the question is how much of how

(01:01:08):
much of it was their responsibility to be informed about
what the therapies were that were available, you know, and
or whether, like there are certain instances even today, whether
there are people who say, you know what, like traditional
medicine isn't doing what I wanted to do. I'm gonna
try this thing. I don't care if it's real or not.

(01:01:28):
As long as it makes me feel better, that's okay
with me. Well, this is another thing that's interesting about
alternative medicines is that very often they are less unpleasant
than the conventional medical procedure. Like if you've got cancer
and the doctors saying, look, the best outcome for you,
statistically is going to be to undergo an aggressive round

(01:01:50):
of chemotherapy is going to make you very it's gonna
put you in a lot of pain and make you
feel sick and make you miserable, but you're gonna have
a much higher percentage chance of survive having this cancer
if you undergo it versus an alternative healer who's saying like, look,
I can give you some massages and you can take
some vitamin C and uh, and I think that's going

(01:02:12):
to help. I mean, it's obvious that one is much
less daunting course of treatment. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Well, I
mean that's very specific to cancer. I'm curious about. I
wonder if Reich did this treatment with people who were
suffering from something that wasn't as extreme as cancer physically, um,
and what what kind of results he had with it.

(01:02:34):
So this again, this is kind of like where I
would love it if the scientific discipline would sort of
dive into these ideas not necessarily or gone, you know
what I mean, But just like some of the general
ideas behind uh the orgasm release having to do with
the physical manifestation of trauma. Oh yeah, I know what

(01:02:55):
you're saying, Like, obviously I don't think there's anything to
orgo and I mean just is kind of it's something
that's pretty funny. Now, what if we're wrong, What if
like two dred years from now, people he was society
is totally based around Oregon and people listen back on
this podcast and they go, what barbarians, Well, please judge

(01:03:15):
me future people. I welcome it. But no, what you
say I think does have some merits because there may
have been other ideas, maybe some of his ideas in
psychoanalysis that have a germ of truth about them. And
uh and I know you think that may be the
case with some of these things, right, yeah. I mean
for me personally, like, I'm much older now than I

(01:03:36):
was when I went to Oregon on Uh, so I
don't necessarily have as much hope for cloud busting as
I used to. But but yeah, I do believe that
there's a certain amount of connection between emotional trauma and
physical um ailments. So so you think his thing about
deep tissue massages for treating psychological disturbances might might have

(01:03:57):
an effect. Yeah, yeah, I I'm willing to believe. Yeah,
I think that's a lot to believe that. I think
that's the thing that could be studied. Yeah, I do too,
um and um and I and you know, I'm obviously
curious about like the tangents that went off, you know,
bio energetics is what his daughter was doing all those
kinds of things. Um, but yeah, I mean he made

(01:04:17):
such a radical leap from that too, here's this space
gun that will shoot down UFOs that it it's problematic,
and and I think that it's problematic in reverse for
his somewhat plausible theories to right and that, like they
were tainted by the craziness around cloud busting, and subsequently

(01:04:42):
people just wanted to stay as far away from it
as possible, and the discipline if they're going to be
taken seriously, I totally agree. I think this is a
thing that can happen in professional disciplines where it like,
what if there is an unconventional hypothesis that is primarily
pursued by somebody who is widely regarded as a quack,
and and somebody later comes back and says, well, of
course their work was bad, their methodology was bad, but

(01:05:04):
there might be something to the hypothesis. I want to
check it out and do a do some better methodology
on it. Uh. There there still might be some resistance
in the field, Right, people might look at us scans
for pursuing that that quack direction that somebody took in
the past. Yeah, I mean I was telling you a
story that when I was in graduate school. One of
my um peers in grad school wanted to do his

(01:05:26):
dissertation on the medics UM and and memes the um
you know, we've covered it before, Susan Blackmore and Richard
Dawkins theories about memes, and he was treated like like
he was an utter idiot by the department, and like
not just in the sense of like his dissertation and

(01:05:47):
the work he was doing, which, as far as I
could tell, like he was he was doing his due
diligence in terms of like his research and writing and
all that stuff, but just like even just in the
everyday classroom, you know, like professors were just like, oh,
this guy, you know, if he would try to bring
the medics into any kind of conversation related to a
rhetorical theory or something like that. Um. So I can

(01:06:07):
see why the same thing would probably happen if the
ploy to judge that not worth talking about. Yeah, Like
if some psychology student was like, all, I don't want
to like really test out some of this raiking and
theory stuff, you know, I could see why they would
be ostracized. So but I do have to say too,
I mean, what do you think would have happened if
Wright didn't pass away in prison, where would this go next?

(01:06:30):
I know what you think, Yeah, I mean I so
I brought this up earlier, and I think that, like
it's another l Ron Hubbard situation. And I think that
he was at the beginning stages of establishing his own
religion in a way based around Oregon and with technological
and scientific principles that aren't accepted by mainstream community, the

(01:06:54):
mainstream community, but that are accepted by the people within
his religion. I don't know that Rightness fairly would have
called it a religion right like he, but it does
have a sort of function, like theological basis to it.
They they yeah, they had the ideology, they had the compound,
they had the right. If you listen to Reik's recordings,
he has a sense of persecution and otherness, and he

(01:07:16):
was a very charismatic guy. Yeah yeah, but yeah, I
have one of his books that I bought when I
was at Argon on it's called Shut Up, Little Man,
and it's basically like a long rant about how everybody
he is wrong about present day circumstances and they should
listen to him because he has the answer. And partly
it's compelling because the things that he's ranting about people

(01:07:37):
having wrong, they did have wrong, Like you know, society
was dysfunctional at the time. That's he wasn't wrong about that.
But I don't know that his answers were necessarily the
place to go. Okay, well, I guess that wraps it
up for Orgo and Energy and Wilhelm Reich today. But
if you want to get in touch with us about
any of the topics we've talked about today, you can
find us on social media where handle is of the Mind.

(01:08:00):
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(01:08:20):
It's stuff to blow your mind dot com. Oh and hey,
if you are really like steeped in this riking and stuff,
because I've heard that you can recreate orgon accumulators and
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one of those and you have access to these, I
would love it if you sent it to us directly,
and the way that you can do that is by

(01:08:41):
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(01:09:08):
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